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And why don't you take a look at what the Wegman panel and the National Research council had to say about Mann's work?

http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/WegmanRe port.pdf
http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/NRCrepor t.pdf

http://www.uoguelph.ca/~bbeacock/images/PRINT_00.T IF Here is the image capture from my scope. It's at 52.95V RMS, and 152V peak-to-peak @ 60.1Hz It looks like its ~250V sine wave with the top flattened off. And it won't grill my sandwich :(

I don't think we should classify the IPCC's (or others) results as evidence from conducted experiments, nor conclusions developed from sound mathematical and scientific theory. Indeed, the overwhelming bulk of conclusions have been drawn from regressions and computer models. As a fellow /.er I tend to put a great deal of faith in these methods, but the level of uncertainty surrounding the parameters used in these models and regressions is staggering. For example, until recently the use of aerosols was believed to contribute to the greenhouse effect, however it has now been shown that, as they reflect a great deal of incoming solar radiation, aerosols actually have a cooling effect on the atmosphere. Simply put, there is a great deal of assumption in these models, much of which has little, if any, scientific foundation.

Case in point is the infamous "hockey stick" produced by Mann for the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). While this graph seems to conclusively show a global warming trend, the structure of the model used to create this "scientific result" is fundamentally flawed. For example, when fed random data the model tends to produce hockey-stick-shaped results, and the strongest weighted (by far) parameters were tree ring thicknesses, a measurement that has been shown to depend greatly on CO2 levels (which all agree have increased) and not just temperature. Mann does not correct for this. See McIntyre and McKitrick (note: not Lomborg and still significant counter-claimists) for more information.

By destroying the credibility of the Monckton article in several of its major assertions, it makes any claim by Monckton suspect. This is basic skepticism 101.

Gee, that's a lot of broken links.

Ok, so I'll have to repeat my standard response to stuff like this.

I love this logic:

1. The climate has always been variable.
1a. The climate is variable on other planets.
2. Therefore, man is not having an impact on today's climate!

QED, right?

Here's an exercise: Explain to me how increased levels of CO2 (which are rising due to humans- I challenge you to find an alternative explanation that has not been debunked from here to Shanghai and back), which Arrhenius demonstrated over 100 years ago [nasa.gov] could cause climate change, can't possibly be causing climate change?

Hey, climate science is uncertain, and questioning the current consensus is great. But if you are going to do so, please find a coherent argument why the current thinking is incorrect (again, please stick to the stuff that hasn't been shown to be wrong 100x over). So please go read RealClimate, debunk them (you have to do better than the M&M side show), and then we can have a conversation.

Yes. Now we know that the centerpiece of that summary, the "Mann Hockey Stick", turned out to be a scientific fraud.

There are three posts describing what glow fuel is, they are all somewhat different, and they are all modded to 4 or 5 points as either informative or insightful. Who is the winner?

And is this post funny, insighful, informative, or is it just off topic?

I go here, and I had a similar experience.

I just finished second-year, so this is still fairly fresh in my mind. In first year, I lived in a room that looked like this. They were small rooms, and both my roommate and I had girlfriends before Christmas, and yes, it's awkward. Before long, you'll freeze like a deer in headlights to the sound of jingling keys. But, if your roommate was like mine, you'll only be worried about your roommate accidentally walking in, not on purpose. I walked in on my roommate on, I believe, 3 occasions, and he walked in on me on 2. I also woke up one morning (early March, I think) to the two of them having sex on the other side of the room. I just rolled over to face the wall, and tried to go back to sleep.

There were no super singles (double rooms with only one person in them) in my section, so there was no sex bed, but people were known to use the lounge every once in a while. If I saw my roommate going into my room with his girlfriend, I'd try to say something like, "I'll be going to bed at 1AM". He got the idea: I wouldn't disturb them until after 1AM. He did the same thing for me, whenever he was around, and it usually worked out well.

It doesn't work that way for everyone though. My girlfriend, for example, had a roommate that "disapproved" of me sleeping there, so I didn't unless she wasn't there. Part of that problem was that she wasn't dating anyone herself. She was a beautiful girl, and guys were going after her all the time, but she wasn't interested.

Other people had similar problems. Some people would 'claim' the room, without warning, forcing their roommates out. A friend of mine had this happen to her. She put up with it for a while, then after that when she wanted in, she'd just announce something like, "you'd better not be naked!", and open the door wide open. Apparently, she caught them at the worst possible time more than once.

In general though, if you respect your roommate's privacy, they'll respect yours. If they don't, there's always other places to go... top of stairwells (if you're quiet), the Arboretum, lecture halls, library (very common, from what I hear), etc. People use the showers, but in general they're high-traffic areas, and you're bound to be discovered.

Yes, that is a universal constant. People will find a way to fuck, no matter what.

I go here, and I had a similar experience.

I just finished second-year, so this is still fairly fresh in my mind. In first year, I lived in a room that looked like this. They were small rooms, and both my roommate and I had girlfriends before Christmas, and yes, it's awkward. Before long, you'll freeze like a deer in headlights to the sound of jingling keys. But, if your roommate was like mine, you'll only be worried about your roommate accidentally walking in, not on purpose. I walked in on my roommate on, I believe, 3 occasions, and he walked in on me on 2. I also woke up one morning (early March, I think) to the two of them having sex on the other side of the room. I just rolled over to face the wall, and tried to go back to sleep.

There were no super singles (double rooms with only one person in them) in my section, so there was no sex bed, but people were known to use the lounge every once in a while. If I saw my roommate going into my room with his girlfriend, I'd try to say something like, "I'll be going to bed at 1AM". He got the idea: I wouldn't disturb them until after 1AM. He did the same thing for me, whenever he was around, and it usually worked out well.

It doesn't work that way for everyone though. My girlfriend, for example, had a roommate that "disapproved" of me sleeping there, so I didn't unless she wasn't there. Part of that problem was that she wasn't dating anyone herself. She was a beautiful girl, and guys were going after her all the time, but she wasn't interested.

Other people had similar problems. Some people would 'claim' the room, without warning, forcing their roommates out. A friend of mine had this happen to her. She put up with it for a while, then after that when she wanted in, she'd just announce something like, "you'd better not be naked!", and open the door wide open. Apparently, she caught them at the worst possible time more than once.

In general though, if you respect your roommate's privacy, they'll respect yours. If they don't, there's always other places to go... top of stairwells (if you're quiet), the Arboretum, lecture halls, library (very common, from what I hear), etc. People use the showers, but in general they're high-traffic areas, and you're bound to be discovered.

Yes, that is a universal constant. People will find a way to fuck, no matter what.

I go here, and I had a similar experience.

I just finished second-year, so this is still fairly fresh in my mind. In first year, I lived in a room that looked like this. They were small rooms, and both my roommate and I had girlfriends before Christmas, and yes, it's awkward. Before long, you'll freeze like a deer in headlights to the sound of jingling keys. But, if your roommate was like mine, you'll only be worried about your roommate accidentally walking in, not on purpose. I walked in on my roommate on, I believe, 3 occasions, and he walked in on me on 2. I also woke up one morning (early March, I think) to the two of them having sex on the other side of the room. I just rolled over to face the wall, and tried to go back to sleep.

There were no super singles (double rooms with only one person in them) in my section, so there was no sex bed, but people were known to use the lounge every once in a while. If I saw my roommate going into my room with his girlfriend, I'd try to say something like, "I'll be going to bed at 1AM". He got the idea: I wouldn't disturb them until after 1AM. He did the same thing for me, whenever he was around, and it usually worked out well.

It doesn't work that way for everyone though. My girlfriend, for example, had a roommate that "disapproved" of me sleeping there, so I didn't unless she wasn't there. Part of that problem was that she wasn't dating anyone herself. She was a beautiful girl, and guys were going after her all the time, but she wasn't interested.

Other people had similar problems. Some people would 'claim' the room, without warning, forcing their roommates out. A friend of mine had this happen to her. She put up with it for a while, then after that when she wanted in, she'd just announce something like, "you'd better not be naked!", and open the door wide open. Apparently, she caught them at the worst possible time more than once.

In general though, if you respect your roommate's privacy, they'll respect yours. If they don't, there's always other places to go... top of stairwells (if you're quiet), the Arboretum, lecture halls, library (very common, from what I hear), etc. People use the showers, but in general they're high-traffic areas, and you're bound to be discovered.

Yes, that is a universal constant. People will find a way to fuck, no matter what.

A bit more information about the dogs-claw-cutter-helper-thing is available at http://www.uoguelph.ca/atguelph/06-04-19/features. shtml.

And here is the page on the History Channel's website about the invention for cutting dogs' toenails. A story about it is here. No website yet.

The parent is completely wrong about how frequencies are controlled in communication circuits, or any other circuits for that matter.

From the parent: "This is important because traditional digital circuits which communicate with each other on specific frequencies, do so by running a clock speed of at least 10 times the communication frequency,"

No. Traditional digital circuits use a phase locked loop. It runs asyncronously. It isn't clocked. The highest frequency involved with any digital circuitry would be the counter which would have to run at the transmitter frequency. Using a frequency divider it is possible to get around that problem too.

Ten times the communication frequency would be 20 GHz. How many chips are you aware of that run at 20 GHz. Modding the parent +5 just shows that people will believe any kind of plausible sounding bs. Give me a break folks. This is just clueless.

http://www.uoguelph.ca/~antoon/gadgets/pll/pll.htm l

Alluded to in the article, an interesting paper on how the IPCC results are not reproducible: http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/NAS.M&M. pdf

f you want a practical definition of a scientist, it is a person who publish in respected, per-reviewed scientific journals....I am sure the two so-called "researchers" you mention would be happy to publish in say Nature if their work was of any merit, but Nature does not publish quasi-science like this.

MacIntyre and McKitrick's paper was published in Nature. If you looked at McKitrick's CV perhaps you missed the 9 peer-reviewed papers he's published in the past 3 years.

Science requires openess and honesty - Mann certainly failed the former test when he refused to release his code for inspection.

You raise modeling as something I don't understand. Interesting since I was trained in modeling and forecasting and saw firsthand its shortcomings. I've seen the assumptions that go into modeling, I've personally seen models fail and watched the people I reported to jigger the model so it gave somewhat sensible forecasts - whether they were accurate or not was immaterial - they just had to look right so we could fulfill a contract.

As to chaos theory, perhaps you're familiar with Lorenz's paper on the futility of long range forecasts based on non-linear equations? His work is one of the textbook cases on how intractable climate forecasting is.

Does poor science qualify? How about Michael Mann's Hockey Stick work? From this week's New Scientist (subscription only article)

There is one sense in which Mann accepts as inarguably true. The point of his original work was to compare past and present temperatures, so he analyzed temperatures in terms of their divergence from the 20th century mean. This approach highlights differences from that period and will thus accentuate any hockey stick shape if - but only if, he insists - it is present in the data.

The charge from McIntyre and McKitrick however, is that Mann's computer program does not merely accentuate this shape, but crates it. To make the point, they did their own analysis based on looking over the past 100 years instead of from the 20th-century mean. This produced a graph showing an apparent rise in tempeartures in the 15th century as as great as the warming occurring now. The shaft of the hockey stick had a big kink in it.

The New Scientist article goes on to cite poor data sources such as tree rings with known variability issues and inherent bias in data selection. When Mann was asked to divulge his source code so it could be inspected for methodology errors, he declined saying it was proprietary code. Revealing methodology is inherent in good science and Mann violated that key precept.

You should be skeptical of climatology in general given that it's even more removed from model failure than meteorolgy. Meteorologists are well acquainted with their models failing because they get feedback on a daily basis. Climatologist don't get that feedback because there's only one climate so they retrofit their models to fit past performance of the climate - a methodology that meteorologists have demonstrated doesn't work very well.

Even worse, they can't even agree on what's going to happen. One model has Europe roasting, another freezing. It can't be both but regardless of which outcome we eventually encounter, climatologists will claim they predicted it.

At it's core, the anthropogenic climate change hypothesis has relied on CO2 emissions as being causative. You have to be skeptical of a claim that an incredibly complex atmosephere which we can't fully model is being driven by variations of a single gas. A gas whose concentration is less than a tenth of one percent.

Funny you should mention that, as it now appears that the "hockey stick" upon which so much alarmist rhetoric has been staked was recently shown to be a statistical artifact.

-ccm

don't waste resources on making stuff better than it needs to be; nobody's going to notice

That is factually incorrect. It is long-established, common knowledge (except by you apparently) that 70 PERCENT OF THE COST OF SOFTWARE IS MAINTENANCE

Stop for a minute and thing about what that means. You as a manager decide that you need a new software tool for your business. So you pay X amount to have someone develop one for you, and you think you are saving money because you "didn't waste resources on making it better than it needs to be." Inevitably, your business grows and you find that you need to add a feature or two to that piece of custom software. Now you find that the changes are going to cost seven times what you paid for the original program!!

That's not my opinion. I didn't just pull that out of my ass. That is a fact that has been proven time and time again by countless studies.

You say, "nobody's going to notice" Well, you're wrong. You're going to notice when you try to add functionality and discover that because the code is crap, now you're going to pay out the nose.

When you say, "don't make it better than it needs to be" that's like saying, "we don't need a sturdy roof on this building because it never rains this time of year."

Other engineering disciplines, structural engineering for example, have learned their lessons the hard way. They've learned that it's actually cheaper to build in quality. Unfortunately, we in the software industry haven't learned that yet, and that's why software is so expensive.

I'll bet you anything that smart companies like Google are writing quality code, looking to the future when they'll want to make changes quickly and without adding new bugs.

OK, so again I could be wrong, be there are pages out there that agree with me (including the first link I got when I searched Google for "significant digits": http://www.physics.uoguelph.ca/tutorials/sig_fig/S IG_dig.htm ) and I daresay there would be more people that support my theory of what constitutes a significant digit than yours.

Because the zero is after the decimal point, it is significant as it shows that the 'hundredths' have been measured and it is zero. "5.1" can be representative of anything between "5.05" and "5.14" when looking at two decimal places.

I don't really care, as all I was doing originally was giving the initial poster something to say if his father mentioned the numbering scheme, but if you're going to correct me (with the confidence implied by words broken up by expletives) then at least understand that you're not entirely correct yourself.

a. Zeroes placed before other digits are not significant; 0.046 has two significant digits.
b. Zeroes placed between other digits are always significant; 4009 kg has four significant digits.
c. Zeroes placed after other digits but behind a decimal point are significant; 7.90 has three significant digits.
d.Zeroes at the end of a number are significant only if they are behind a decimal point as in (c). Otherwise, it is impossible to tell if they are significant. For example, in the number 8200, it is not clear if the zeroes are significant or not. The number of significant digits in 8200 is at least two, but could be three or four. To avoid uncertainty, use scientific notation to place significant zeroes behind a decimal point...

...any zeros that follow the last non-zero digit to the right of the decimal point are significant, e.g.: 0.002400 has four significant figures.

is where you can find the critique of Mann and the hockey stick.

http://www.climateaudit.org/

is the blog of continuing critiques by McKintyre.

www.realclimate.org

is the place to go for Mann & his supporters.

Have fun!

The Hubble primary mirror is only 2.4 meters. This one is 30 meters. In addition the Hubble's mirror was flawed from it's very creation. http://www.uoguelph.ca/~ebaig/brian.html

The Hubble takes very cool images. But it is obsolete technology. Hubble is not the be-all and end-all of all telescopes for ever and ever. I find it interesting that people almost worship the instrument. In addition it is already past it's original operational life. Someday it will fail.

There are now techniques that correct for the earth's atmospheric distortion which enable earth-based telescopes to be much better than the Hubble. And also, the Hubble cost $1.5 billion!

So is this new telescope worth it? I think it is. Especially since it is being funded by people and companies in the private sector and not by government taxes.

It would not have been hard for me to draw (or find a drawing on the Net) an x/y axis cross, a circle and a triangle, and put the appropriate labels on them. Starting from there the explanation is one short paragraph.

However, I can't be bothered. There are plenty on the Net already. Both ASCII art, pretty drawings and interactive demos (Java applet). You may have to search a little longer for a truly minimalistic and concise answer to your question, but noone is stopping you.

See http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/trc.html for information regarding attempts to reproduce Manns calculations (as scientific method requires).

Mann was unable to produce the spreadsheets he says he used to process the data.

Click the link. Get some facts. Think for yourself.

I originally posted from memory and didn't take the time to do an on-line search. While there may have been an issue with that (which I've never heard of), the infamous Hubble mirror problem was that Perkin-Elmer built the mirror wrong due to a flawed instrument, and ignored the other instruments that were telling them it wasn't the right shape. Some details on the measuring error you mention are given here and a mention of a misplaced measuring rod cap is discussed here.

there are lots of people working on ALS (advanced life support), including me :-) here are a couple of places to look - NASA and the University of Guelph in Canada.

From the article:

"Ignore the origin and look at the technology on its own terms. (This will be easier with the emergence of 'open source' genetic engineering, which could work around restrictive corporate patents.) What is its net effect on the environment? GM crops are more efficient, giving higher yield on less land with less use of pesticides and herbicides. That's why the Amish, the most technology-suspicious group in America (and the best farmers), have enthusiastically adopted GM crops."

Less use of herbicides? HAHA!!! Not even close. Many GMOs are made herbicide resistant so more herbicides can and are being dumped onto crops, fact is herbicide resistance encourages the use of more herbicides. How about increased yield? That I know of there's not one study that has concluded GMOs increase yield, however some studies has concluded they don't:

3. Does GE actually increase yield, or even have the potential to increase yield?

US Secretary of Agriculture, Dan Glickman, reportedly stated in a 1996 talk to the World Food Summit in Rome, that "Biotechnology can give us a quantum leap forward in food security by improving disease and pest resistance, increasing tolerance to environmental stress, raising crop yields, and preserving plant and aimal diversity" If you listen to radio advertisements aired in Ontario just last week, increasing yield is one of the key selling features of GE crops. But are these claims scientifically defensible?

Although "increasing yield" is one of the most common benefits attributed to GE, evidence to substantiate this (or any of the other oft-repeated claims) is hard to find. Lappe and Bailey (1998; p.82) analyzed data from soybean yield trials reported by Ashlock (1996). Yields from the 1995 and 1996 years were reviewed, with yield of Roundup Ready (RR) soybean varieties contrasted with that of their nearest conventional counterpart. In 30 of 38 comparisons, the conventional variety outyielded the RR variety. Mean reduction in yield of the RR varieties was 4.3 bu/ac or almost 10%, a loss which was statistically significant.

A more recent review of 40 soybean varietal trials in the north central region of the US by Oplinger et al. (1999) found a mean 4% yield drag in RR soybeans. Even comparing the top 5 varieties from each, RR still yielded 5% less than conventional soybeans. Thus, there is a cost to the crop from expressing the genes for Roundup resistance, and it manifests itself in lower yields.

Brown (1998) cites evidence of a marked plateauing of yield in most major world food crops. He contends that the really major gains in wheat, rice, and corn yield occurred between 1950 and 1990, due to improvements in harvest index, coupled with intensification of resource use. Gains since 1990 have slowed markedly, as the potential for additional gains is rapidly used up. It is difficult to see how genetic engineering, particularly with the simply inherited traits prominent in current GE crops, can fundamentally lower the "wall" inhibiting further gains in yield.
Debunking the Myths of Genetic Engineering in Field Crops

You do know that Mann writes this website, right? You do realize that the source of your argument (http://www.realclimate.org/) is a shill for Mann and his cronies?

I think the important conlusion of this guide is that if you take all of the original Mann, Bradley and Hughes data and run it using the same fully open-source algorithms of McKitrick & McIntyre, you get the same results.

Which is reasonable since MM's argument is about source data and not methodology (as per this guide).

However, it's important to note that some people post some pretty weird shit on LiveJournal - especially the Russians! - so it's not always work safe. Actually, sometimes that's what makes it so interesting - you can almost put your finger on the pulse of what's going on in people's heads across the world by scanning through the photos, and the time of day makes a difference, too. For example, St. Patrick's Day is coming up, so I'm sure there are going to be more and more images with shamrocks and leprechauns in them. Needless to say, Valentine's Day was an interesting one as well - lots of broken heart graphics and photos with faces scribbled out. Just get used to seeing this photo of a cat passed out next to a bottle of booze, because it's in there every other time I load the script.

Arrogance, hubris, and stupidity need no conspiracy.

The crux of the whole climate change debate is "is it man-made?".

If it is at least mostly caused by man then we can actually change it if we would even want to (some would argue that we shouldn't so as to preempt a coming iceage). If it isn't we would not be able to do much about it (and some others again would argue that by trying we could cause a lot of harm to the earth natural cycle into and out of iceages).

The only reasonably accurate answer is "we have no clue!".

Arrogance. Those claiming that it is man-made are basing their opinion on models that are so incomplete and lacking that it is ludicrous. The models need a lot of further development before they're anywhere close to reliable. For starters they could actually correct the errors that have been found instead of defending the errors.

Hubris. Meteorology often fails at predicting the weather for the next day as we simply do not know enough about the myriad of different causal chains. Yes we know some but obviously not enough. So take meteorology (which is obviously part of the climate sciences) and multiply it with the knowledge of ocean- and earth-based causes and effects (both of which we know less), then scale all of this from a day or a week up to the next fifty years or more.

Stupidity. And somehow, after all of this is done they (the man-made climate changes crowd) think it is fair, logical, reasonable or rational to believe the end result to be more certain than the next days weather?

So if I'm right why are we even having this conversation? Well, people in general need to realize that:
- outside their personal field of excellence/expertise any scientist usually has no more authority on judging matters than anyone else unless they themselves use and check common methods like mathematical and logical accuracy etc. Simply put most don't know shit and go with the flow without much scepticism.
- within a scientific discipline many scientists will not go through the trouble of actually checking the details of what they support if they think it sounds reasonable and if they know (read: like) whoever said it. This is why peer review often fails at catching errors.

Otherwise the mistakes and erroneous conclusion would not have gotten as far as it did in the first place.

The article in the original story itself is as idiotic as the rest. They're comparing a limited (at least in time) worth of oceanographic data and finding that one of their models (out of many models) manage to match the data. Does that prove anything at all on its own? Absolutely not unless it actually manages to to be accurate in predicting the future! And even more importantly: a good model would manage to fit all the available data we have precisely and absolutely none of the models manage to do that, and those who come close only achieve that by more or less random tinkering with the programming code of the models!

Poor science + stupid media hype = poor decisions

MIT is obviously one of the biggest engineering schools in North America, but it should be noted that my school has had a Biological Engineering Program for quite some time.

Don't get me wrong, good on MIT for adding this new major, but it should be noted that others have already done so.

MIT is obviously one of the biggest engineering schools in North America, but it should be noted that my school has had a Biological Engineering Program for quite some time.

Don't get me wrong, good on MIT for adding this new major, but it should be noted that others have already done so.

Close to being 100% correct but...

[ I'm assuming you're in the US here. ]

There are no TV channels in the 72 mHz band. However, channel 4 goes from 66 to 72 mHz, so it may very well interfere with the lower channel numbers. But it *should* stop at 72 mHz, and it would affect channel 11 before 22 and 23 ...

As for why those channels are banned at your club, it's much more likely that there's a pager tower or something nearby that transmits between those two frequencies. [Yes, pager towers often do use the frequencies right between our channels.]

R/F interference is a complicated issue. This page goes over many of the concerns pretty well, at least the ones arising from the design of our receivers.

I've been using two monitors for about for years now, and I don't thik I could ever go back! The swing arm thing in the article seems cool, but I must say that I love my Ikea Desk! Was around $200 and the moitors can swing--I'm a student and my bed is beside my desk, so I can swing my monitor to face my bed to watch tv and movies!

The two monitors come in very handy when programing, writing reports, or surfing the web while IM'ing. Just did a networking assignment last night, and I could have several consoles open on the 2nd monitor to test clients/server while coding on the other monitor.

If you haven't tried 2 monitors, do it now! No excuses, 's cheap--if you don't have a vid card that can do 2 monitors, get a 2nd cheap pci card for like $20 and throw another monitor on.. do it!

Yeah, and you can read all about it here, including the actual reviewer comments.

Some of the biology is outside my field, but the parts which I can follow (the statistical arguments) seem well done.

Some of this work has been published in Energy and Environment. Interestingly, after a ``revise and resubmit'' at Nature, Nature turned them down, saying the subject was ``too technical''. The referee reports suggest that it may yet make it into that journal.

Some of the biology is outside my field, but the parts which I can follow (the statistical arguments) seem well done.

Some of this work has been published in Energy and Environment. Interestingly, after a ``revise and resubmit'' at Nature, Nature turned them down, saying the subject was ``too technical''. The referee reports suggest that it may yet make it into that journal.

Only if you're sure the weight of the item is 5.500000000 ounces. You see, significant digits do matter.

The stuff shown by quantum mechanics is entirely physical, and you can see its effects quite easily. You're using the behavior of an electron encountering a step potential right now to read this post. If that doesn't satisfy, then just take a look at any image from an STM taken around atomic resolution.
Corral See all the waves?

The call for physical proof is significant:
mathematics can describe things which don't/can't exist in this universe. Just because mathematics says that I can take any solid and rearrange it into any other solid using rigid motions, even if they don't have the same volume (Banach-Tarski Paradox) doesn't mean that I should expect to actually accomplish this on any physical object.

For the record.

Thanks Google.

Salmon and Trout are the same species, just different subspecies. Is this really surprising? (In fact, Steelhead Salmon is the exact same fish as Rainbow Trout. The only difference is that Steelhead swim to the ocean, Rainbow Trout stay in rivers. Really. http://www.aps.uoguelph.ca/~ontaqua/name.html

This is about as surprising as a Calico cat giving birth to a Siamese cat. Extremely unusual, but not a huge deal.

Oh, I see. The story talks about DIFFERENT species. Well, then call them by their full names. Just saying "salmon" and "trout" doesn't say much.

News Flash: Retriever gives birth to Terrier! :-p

But isn't cubical growth just exponential growth where k = 3?

However, sending out an email saying "Everyone needs to meet and sing kumbaya to built group unity and get together on how this thing works" is stupid. Give me a task, let me do it, and if it doesn't work, fire me.

Or they could adopt Unix Philosophy. If a program does one thing well and stores all data in flat text files, working independently on programs is easy, since the formats are agreed upon.

Here's how some of the other guys did it.

The Unix Philosophy

said Massimo Marcone, a professor of food science at the University of Guelph

he's a professor (adjunct faculty) not a medical doctor so you're doubly correct to be concerned about his medical facts. as a matter of fact, based on what the rest of the faculty appears to be working on (cheese making, food safety, microbial films...) i don't know what the hell he's doing making comments about the medical implications of caffeine.

Food Science, University of Guelph

vs. dumb-asses.

500 volts? 45 volts is enough to kill you... at 10 amperes!

Seriously, aren't we nerds, or something?!

Right now I plan on going to a college that is either in New England, New York, or south east Canada.

South? We don't have that. We have a west, an east, and a far north.

In any case, if you're considering schools in Canada, I highly suggest that you take a look at the Maclean's Canadian University Ranking, if you haven't already.

If you're looking out east (and I mean east of Ontario), I've heard nothing but good things about Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia. Plus, you can see the school ring from a mile away, you'll never have trouble identifying fellow alumni. (It has a big black 'X' on it)

In Ontario, U of Toronto is good for just about everything, and is in a huge city, whereas Guelph has one of the best bio/chem programs going, and a laid back complete-university-town feel to it.

Alternate suggestion: University of British Columbia on the west coast. You have to go all the way to the west end of the country, but some of the bonuses included with this school are good weather, good weed, easy access to world-class skiing, and a topless beach.

Speaking of topless, in Ontario bare female breasts are perfectly legal. I can tell you from experience that this facet of the law is often incorporated into frosh week activities.

Good Luck!

Perkin-Elmer had done the rough grinding of the mirror in 1978, and had finished the final polishing in 1981. As the telescope's 2.4 meter primary mirror was being polished, an unrecognized 1.308 millimeter error in the structure of a device used to monitor the process caused technicians to give the mirror an exquisitely smooth surface with a grossly inaccurate shape. The result is the "spherical aberration" that now bathes the stars in fuzz whenever Hubble tries to look at them. The culprit device was called the reflective null corrector.

Ser, no offence, but you are very stubborn. Diamond needs minimum 2200 degrees F for the process to get started. I AM a jeweler with diploma and many years of experience in the trade.

So it is nice to have an opinion, but it is better to keep it to yourself if it is uninformed. Why don't you try to google some information, or visit some jewelry shop before you post?

Diamond does change into graphite at a significant rate
at higher temperatures, and above 1,500 degrees Celsius [~2700F], the reaction is quite rapid.